Belarus Free Theatre are now a very
different company from the one that first visited Britain in 2007. In
those days they were a group of Minsk-based theatre artists giving
clandestine performances which served as protests against, and savage
satirical indictments of, the last dictatorship in Europe. Since the
company leaders were forced into exile here in 2011, the Free Theatre
has become an international ensemble making work that is much more
conscious both of perceived obligations to make more universal
statements, and also aware of its status as a cultural brand.
Red Forest hits the
internationalist buttons, in part, by containing no dialogue. There are
occasional contextualising voice-overs delivered, live, from the sides
of the stage where musicians are also working; location captions flash
up on the environmental video projections across the top of the playing
area; but the body of the piece consists of mime and movement work.
This is principally representational rather than symbolic or
impressionistic, intercutting the vague narrative of a young woman
(Michal Keyamo) struggling to survive and provide for her baby with
instances of the unkind world in which she moves. This unpleasantness
takes the form of human violence, ecological catastrophe, or simply of
unyielding nature.
The cast’s work under the direction of co-founder Nicolai Khalezin is
intense and committed. It’s just that the piece has nothing coherent or
original to say. When the company were documenting oppression in their
own and other lands, there was an immediacy and genuine power to their
work; I’ve seen Belarussian government plants attempt to derail a
previous performance in this same Young Vic space a couple of years
ago. But the present collage of disparate real-life testimonies from
Africa, South America, Japan, the First Nations of Canada etc. never
coalesces into any message less vaporous than that life is tough in all
parts of the world. I found myself irreverently recalling Ian Dury’s
“Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”: “In the deserts of Sudan/And the
gardens of Japan…” And that’s the other crucial difference from the
earlier, mordant work: there is not a single laugh, not even a passing
smile, no particle of either satire or self-deprecation, in these 80
minutes. When did Belarus Free Theatre undergo the bleak, crippling
transformation from being a serious force to merely being earnest?
Written for the Financial
Times.